The Healer’s Curse

Maleka Charles

Raymond “Khehla” Ndlondlo had become a legend in Johannesburg’s CBD. For twelve years, he’d walked the cracked pavements of Gauteng with the confidence of a man who owned them. 

By day, he wrapped himself in beads and skins, a sangoma with the gift of healing. 

His small consultation room smelled of burnt impepho, drums lined the walls, and desperate men and women queued for charms to protect their homes, their jobs, their marriages. 

They left believing in his power.But behind the curtains, away from the cowrie shells and bone throwing, Khehla’s true trade thrived. 

A careful network of young runners slipped through the alleys, carrying packets that never saw the light of day. Taxi ranks, taverns, and the shadows beneath the highway bridges—those were his real shrines.

Khehla had mastered the art of invisibility. Police raids came and went, yet his name never appeared in their reports. Rival dealers whispered about him but rarely dared to challenge his territory. 

He was cunning enough to make enemies vanish quietly, their absence explained by car accidents, overdoses, or simply a disappearance into the night.Tonight, though, the city carried a different tension. 

The streets hummed louder, and even the flickering neon lights outside Bree Street seemed to tremble. Khehla, seated cross-legged in his candle-lit room, sensed a shift. 

The bones he had just cast did not lie—they spoke of betrayal, of blood, of a storm that would test the empire he had built brick by brick, street by street.And for the first time in years, Khehla wondered if the ancestors were warning him… or laughing at him.

Khehla lit a cigarette, letting the smoke coil lazily toward the ceiling. The bones on the mat before him were scattered in a pattern he did not like—two lying apart from the rest, split, like brothers turned enemies. 

He rubbed his jaw, thinking of the whispers he’d heard in the streets: a new player moving in from Alexandra, young and reckless, not bound by the old codes.

They called him Sizwe “Shakes” Molefe—a hustler with nothing to lose and a hunger for everything Khehla already owned.

Khehla rose, straightening his robes, and stepped into the backroom where three of his most trusted lieutenants waited. 

They weren’t customers, and they weren’t family—they were soldiers. Men who had been with him since the beginning, back when Khehla was just another boy from Soweto trying to survive.

Back then, the sangoma disguise had been nothing more than a shield, a way to hide in plain sight. 

His grandmother had been a healer, respected and feared. Khehla had borrowed her ways, her beads, her incense, until the city believed the role as much as he played it. 

The money from herbs and consultations was never enough, but the trust it bought him was priceless. From there, drugs were the natural step—lucrative, silent, and invisible beneath the smoke of ritual.Now, twelve years later, that empire stretched across Gauteng. 

But empires had cracks, and Khehla knew it.“Shakes thinks he can eat where he has not planted,” Khehla said to his men, his voice calm but cold. 

“We will remind him that Johannesburg does not forget who built its streets.”The men nodded, but Khehla saw the hesitation in their eyes. 

Even loyalty had limits, and fear was a currency as unstable as the city itself.Outside, the night deepened, and somewhere across town, Shakes Molefe was loading a gun, ready to test the myth of Raymond Ndlondlo.